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POLITICO 44

The Government Accountability Office is investigating a $5.5 million error in the budget of the U.S. Capitol Police – and it’s not particularly happy with the cooperation it’s getting with the department.

At a hearing of the legislative subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee Wednesday, U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said the GAO first raised flags about discrepancies in the department’s budget in early February.

But when the GAO asked the department for more information, Dodaro said, it received an incomplete response.

“We received spread sheets and other information that were different from what the budget said, so we flagged this area,” said Dodaro. “We were trying to ask them for more information without getting a lot of complete information.”

A GAO spokesman said the office will now provide a full investigative report to Congress, which will review where the department’s number crunching erred and how the problem can be prevented.

This investigation is separate from the internal investigation the police department is currently conducting.

“I think this is an area where we can make a very valuable contribution,” said Dodaro. “We need to do a lot more deep analysis to find out the problem is in the situation but much more, why this happened, and what can be done to fix this to be sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the chairwoman of the subcommittee, suggested that it may be time for the chief of police to lose control over his own budget.

“The Capitol Police previously was not responsible for their budget and I’m not confident they should continue to be responsible for their budget,” Wasserman Schultz said.

Wasserman Schultz has mentioned several times that she is considering swapping the police budget back to the legislative branch, a loss of control that one upper-level officer said would be a “major hit” to both Morse and the police department. The legislative branch oversaw the budget until Capitol Police took it over in 2003.

Dodaro and Wasserman Schultz both said Wednesday that the monumental task of protecting the Capitol and its lawmakers may not leave the police department and its leadership enough time to focus on numbers.

“You wouldn’t have a coal miner run a restaurant,” Wasserman Schultz said.